Ron Fair, EVP and Chief Creative Officer at
Virgin Records and the New Music Seminar are looking for the best new A&R people. Fair will select twelve finalists and conduct a live chat interview via the hot new Shindig video chat platform in mid-April.

The unlimited playlist. Sharing the music you love. Everyone is a creator. Technology has certainly changed music, but not always in good ways, as these three cartoons from Drew at Toothpaste For Dinner via Mashable illustrate.

Ali Spagnola took a drinking game called Power Hour and turned it into the basis for an album, concert and shot glass USB. Then she got sued by a trademark troll who claimed the rights to "Power Hour" though it was in common usage. It cost Spagnola $30,000 but she didn't let that stop her and now she's taking her game to another level with a crowdfunding campaign for "Ali's Power Hour Freedom Victory Tour."

Roger Faxon has had a distinguished career in the entertainment industry. He was executive vice president/COO at LucasFilm, a founding partner of the film and television production unit Mount Company, and a senior executive vice president at Columbia Pictures. He joined EMI in 1994 after serving as CEO of London-based Sotheby’s Europe. Until a year ago, he was CEO of EMI Group. Faxon orchestrated the sale of EMI’s Recorded Music and Publishing Assets, respectively, to Universal Music Group and Sony/ATV Publishing.

Though seldom discussed on most music industry blogs, college radio is an important part of the landscape for indie music acts. Though some stations are seeing hard times, others are thriving and music is often a key element in their success. Here are three stations that have made music news in 2013.

This week Spotify launched its first-ever major ad campaign, and with it has come the new more streamlined corporate logo pictured on the left. We saw it at the launch of the $10 million TV campaign designed to introduce Spotify to a broader audience prior the launch of new music streaming services planned by Google, Apple and Amazon.

Musicians especially independent musicians have so many tasks to do and keep up with that it can get overwhelming. From blogging to interacting on social media, musicians are expected to be everywhere online. On Music Think Tank, Brian Hazard gives a list of items that he tackles each week. What list of items do you have to finish on a weekly basis...monthly basis, etc?

(UPDATED) Facebook social loyalty app Fanzy announced the completion of a $550,000 seed financing round with investments from Kima Ventures (Rapportive, Sparrow), Start Capital (State.com, Senzari) and OREFA, the investment fund of Jacques-Antoine Granjon, founder of Vente-Privee. The new funds together with Fanzy's previous angel financing brings the company's total financing to over $1.5 million.

Venture Harbour's Marcus Taylor gathered "pieces of advice" for "aspiring entrepreneurs" from 30 music industry entrepreneurs. I've taken the liberty of excerpting the top 5 that I think musicians will find of use in building their businesses since entrepreneurial thinking is key for artists as well. Plus, Taylor shared some advanced Facebook marketing insights linked below.

A new IDC a survey conducted in conjunction with Facebook looks at how consumers use smartphones. It surveyed 4,446 people aged 18-44 with either iPhones and Android phones. In this chart, you can see how they use Facebook on their smartphones, and it's not for discovery of or listening to music.

Venture capitalist and blogger Fred Wilson, whose firm invests in Turntable.fm, SoundCloud, Twitter, and other companies, weighed in on an issue we’ve written about several times: true music portability.

By that, I mean the ability of music fans to take their music from one service to another, instead of being locked into Spotify, Pandora, or any other service.

Prior to co-foundingEVNTLIVEin January, 2012, David Carrico was CEO of CMG, a music industry marketing, consulting and management group. Here, he calls on the music industry to work with new companies and business models to create a much needed new revenue stream from online concert streams. "It's not just about EVNTLIVE," Carrico says, "this extends to other industries as well."

Love 'em, hate 'em, it doesn't matter. Google Glass or Glasses, depending on what suits, are going to be part of your reality. Welcome to a wearable technology that will have unexpected effects on the world of music. But musicians and music pundits aren't waiting for the actual tech to arrive as you can see from the following bit of paranoia plus 5 ways musicians can benefit.

Last year, Jamie Leger wrote a post about the dawn of the Musicpreneur. Now, Tommy Darker has put his thoughts on what tasks musicpreneuers have to do. Check out the first part of his list of things that modern DIY artists have to do and his recommendations. As a DIY artist, have you considered the items that Tommy talks about and created a strategy?

Should company's that advertise on pirate sites be punished as supporting piracy? It's a debate that's raged in the music community in recent weeks fueled in part by Cracker's David Lowery. On his Trichordist blog, Lowery wrote that brands who advertise on pirate sites are "supporting not only music piracy, but also the mainstream piracy of films and every other kind of digitally distributed work." and called for an end to the practice.

Forbes has just released it's Forbes 5 list of Hip Hop's Richest Artists based on net worth. Many of those on the list are not new to the hip hop game and used their fame and earnings to extend their brand or invest in other industries. Top ranked Sean “Diddy” Combs scored with his deal Diageo’s Ciroc that pays the Combs eight-figures annually.

Self-service online event ticketing platform Eventbrite, today announced that it has sold 100 million tickets and process $1.5
billion in gross ticket sales since the founding of the company in 2006. These milestones illustrate accelerating
growth of the independent ticketing sector fueled improving technology and growing "anybody but Ticketmaster" sentiment.

Last March, jazz-funk jam band Galactic took to Conan O’Brien’s stage and performed the track “Hey Na Na” off their recently released album Carnivale Electricos. Joined by R&B vocalist Corey Glover and brass ensemble The Soul Rebels, they brought “a little bit of New Orleans to the stage,” as Conan himself put it. Over the next 24 hours, Galactic saw a 335 percent increase in daily traffic to their Wikipedia page.

The 6th Annual Record Store Day is just a few weeks away on April 20th and anticipation is rising with news of the full list of upcoming exclusive vinyl releases. There are also an interesting range of related book and DVD releases as well as a variety of contests.

Music driven sites dominated the top 10 entertainment web sites in the United States in early 2013, according to Nielson. Top ranked YouTube's website had 124 million unique U.S. visitors in January 2013 who spent an average of 1 hour 57 minutes using the site during the month.

A few weeks ago I went to a seminar by best-selling author and public speaker Patrick Snow on creating a successful career as a self-published book author. I was invited by a friend of mine, Randall Broad, who wrote a memoir and is now working as a motivational speaker. At 41, Patrick makes a pretty good living (six figures of some kind) as an author, public speaker, and coach/consultant to other authors. To quote his website: